U.S. Take The Lead In Supercomputer Race

For the first time in three year a U.S. supercomputer tops the list of the most powerful systems in the world...

The Sequoia supercomputer, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a whopping 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. The Sequoia system is also one of the most energy efficient on the list.

The U.S. has another two systems in the top 10 list. The Mira supercomputer, another IBM BlueGene/Q system at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which now holds 3rd position, performing at 8.15 petaflop/s using 786,432 cores; and the upgraded Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee now comes in 6th.

One Section of Sequoia – The world’s fastest supercomputer

Last years winner, Fujitsu’s “K Computer” installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, has moved to 2nd place with 10.51 Pflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.

Japan’s Fujitsu K-Computer Supercomputer

Germany has two systems in the top 10; the SuperMUC, an IBM iDataplex system installed at Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany comes in 4th, and the JuQUEEN BlueGene/Q at Forschungszentrum Juelich, is 8th.

Italy makes its debut in the Top 10 earning 7th place for an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at CINECA. 1.72 Pflop/s performance and France occupies the No. 9 spot with a homegrown Bull supercomputer.

China’s most powerful system, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, now ranks 5th – down from it’s previous position in 1st and 2nd during 2011.

Another Chinese system, the Nebulae at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen comes in in 10th position.

The 39th edition of the list was officially released on June 18, at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.